International Day of Afro-Latin American Women: Resistance Transcends Borders

For four years, from AfroResistencia we have documented and accompanied the life stories of Black women who have passed through the Colombian penal system. Through our Breaking Chains Network, 40 women who were deprived of liberty in Jamundí prison, Valle del Cauca, have transformed their experiences of pain into tools of political resistance and community transformation.

Some of the participants and their children of Breaking Chains Network in Cali Colombia

These women have taught us that incarceration is not an isolated event, but the result of intersecting structural violence: racism, sexism, classism, forced displacement, and the criminalization of poverty. Their testimonies reveal how the penal system operates as a machinery of racial and social control, punishing with greater harshness those who have already been marginalized by society.

In Colombia, as throughout the region, punitive drug policies have become weapons of social control that particularly devastate Black communities. The women in our network were criminalized for survival strategies: carrying substances to detained partners, participating in micro-commerce, or assuming guilt to protect their families. They were not drug traffickers. They were impoverished women, with low education levels, without adequate defense, who survived as they could.

Invisibility Extends Throughout the Region

This reality is not limited to Colombia. In Panama, on this International Day of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women, we raise our voices for those whose stories are almost never told: incarcerated Black women who face the same systematic violence that we have documented in our work.

In Panama, women represent between 5 and 7% of the prison population. However, about 70% are detained for drug-related crimes

In Panama, women represent between 5 and 7% of the prison population. However, about 70% are detained for drug-related crimes: micro-dealing, carrying drugs to detained partners, or assuming guilt to save family members. In the vast majority of cases, they are not drug traffickers. They are impoverished women, with low education levels, Black women, without adequate defense or access to fundamental rights.

Criminal justice does not act in the abstract. It is applied to bodies marked by living conditions, skin color, and gender roles. It operates with disproportionate violence against Black women, ignoring the structural causes that pushed them to break the law.

In Panama and the region, women are judged not only by the Penal Code, but also by moral parameters that evoke biblical rigor. Family, church, neighborhood, and the State do not forgive equally when the offender is a woman. They are required to be self-sacrificing mothers, obedient wives, sacrificial daughters. Those who step outside that mold are doubly condemned.

Upon regaining freedom, they have difficulties finding a place to return to. They have lost family contact. There are few comprehensive reintegration programs. Stigma nullifies any opportunity. Incarceration leaves deep physical, emotional, and spiritual scars.

In Colón, the women's penitentiary center "Nueva Esperanza" is a national shame: inhumane conditions, deficient water service, unsafe spaces. They sleep among humidity, sewage, pests, and abandonment. No human being should be there, least of all a woman punished for surviving poverty.

Our Resistance Transcends Borders

From our experience with Breaking Chains in Colombia, we know it is possible to transform pain into political power. The 40 women in our network have completed socio-political training processes, have developed autonomous leadership, and actively participate in racial and gender justice networks. Despite facing systematic violence—including the transfeminicide of a trans sex worker companion—the network maintains its commitment to political action.

Their resistance has taught us that individual transformation and systemic transformation go hand in hand. Therefore, from AfroResistencia we demand:

• Penitentiary policies with dignity, racial justice, and gender perspective

• That the judicial system recognize social determinants: poverty, state abandonment, gender violence, structural racism, and unemployment

• Penitentiary centers where dignity is preserved, and processes without moral stoning for being women

This July 25th, it is not enough to celebrate Afrodescendant identity without looking at the country's detention centers. It is not enough to speak of equality without denouncing how the penal system operates as a machinery of racial and social punishment.

Incarcerated Black women are also diaspora. They are also political subjects. They also resist.

Remembering them today is an act of justice. Fighting for their freedom, healing, and dignity is an urgent task. From AfroResistencia, we honor their life, their struggle, and their right to live without physical or social confinement.